I can’t answer any of those questions. The nature of my business was such that I preferred to leave them unanswered rather than bring disaster by inquiring too closely. I know the mine payroll never got back into the owner’s hands. I assume it was found by a laborer, who kept it. The reconstruction of the finding of my money and the picturing of its finder furnished me with many hours of mental relaxation. Lying in the dungeon or in the hop joint or on the grass in the public parks, I pieced it together painfully. But never could I see the lucky finder as an honest man; nor by any effort of imagination could I ever picture him as putting the money to any good use. In the end, he always turned out to be a drunken, dissolute day laborer, sweating in the sun as he dug out the ditch for the foundation of that building. I saw him turn up the leather pouch with his shovel, seize it, open it stealthily, and thrust it inside his shirt. Then he threw down his shovel, walked over to the boss, and demanded his “time.”
I heard the foreman say: “All right, you’re no good anyway. I was going to fire you to-night.”
I followed the finder to the little depot where he bought a ticket to the wide-open joyful town of Montreal. There I watched him dissipate my money riotously in the slums. At last, and with great satisfaction, I saw him dead in the gutter without a dime, and followed his body to the morgue, where the coroner pronounced it a case of “acute alcoholism.”
After a long tiresome ride I delivered the fagged horse to his owner and went off to a quiet spot to sum up and see how I stood with the world. My loss was not put down to poetic justice or attributed to the law of compensation. I just classified it as a mess of tough luck and tried to forget it. An inventory of my possessions showed one pocketknife, one pencil, a bandanna handkerchief, tobacco and papers, and nine dollars. I was a hundred miles away from any place where I could put my hands on a dollar without getting arrested at sunrise. I had no gun, no keys, no instruments. I was a shorn lamb. No one but myself was to blame for the shearing, and it was up to me to get busy and temper the wind as quickly as possible.
In the way of clothes I had those I left Los Angeles in—overalls, blue shirt, a stout coat, and a cheap cap.
After bumming a stage ride, beating my way over a jerkwater branch road, and stowing away on a Columbia River boat loaded with dynamite and explosive oil for the mines, I got into one of the prosperous camps with a lone dollar in my pocket. The town was booming; crowded with miners, prospectors, and speculators. Beds were two dollars a night and meals a dollar. This caused me no uneasiness, for I knew it would be easier to get three dollars there than fifteen cents in the big cities where, in those days, a “chicken dinner” could be had for a dime and a “flop” on a bare floor for a “jit,” as the Southern negro affectionately calls his nickel.
In a restaurant I met an old friend in the person of the waiter, who had formerly been a very active member of the “Johnson” family. He was still in good standing, although he had retired from the road after several unfortunate experiments with burglary and robbery. It was late at night; I took an hour to eat, and he listened with genuine sympathy to all the harrowing details of my latest experience. At the cash register, where he also officiated, my dollar was no good. He offered to share his room with me, and when I declined, explaining that I would be too busy to sleep, he magnanimously suggested that I “prowl the joint” he lived in. This looked all right, and I took his room key with the understanding that if anything went wrong in the place I could say I was looking for his room and he would alibi for me.
It was late when I started to look through his hotel. I lost half an hour locating a sleeper with his door unlocked, and another half hour pulling his moneyless trousers from under his head, where he had placed them from force of habit. I fared better in another room, and, calling it a night, hastened to my friend’s place to return his key and look over my takings.
The restaurant was deserted. I joined him at a back table, where he sat cleaning a row of water glasses. Blowing his breath into one, like a housewife with a lamp chimney, he polished it carefully with a soiled napkin. “Did you score?” he inquired.
“Yes,” I said.